Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

   Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it

dish in hand, graceful as a swan. Ten seconds later he

was bowing reverently to a customer. And you could

not help thinking, as you saw him bow and smile, with

that benign smile of the trained waiter, that the cus-

tomer was put to shame by having such an aristocrat to

serve him.

   This washing up was a thoroughly odious job-not

hard, but boring and silly beyond words. It is dreadful

to think that some people spend their whole decades at

such occupations. The woman whom I replaced was

quite sixty years old, and she stood at the sink thirteen

hours a day, six days a week, the year round; she was,

in addition, horribly bullied by the waiters. She gave

out that she had once been an actress-actually, I

imagine, a prostitute; most prostitutes end as char-

women. It was strange to see that in spite of her age and

her life she still wore a bright blonde wig, and darkened

her eyes and painted her face like a girl of twenty. So

apparently even a seventy-eight-hour week can leave

one with some vitality.

                         XIII

ON my third day at the hotel the

chef du personnel, who

had generally spoken to me in quite a pleasant tone,

called me up and said sharply:

   "Here, you, shave that moustache off at once!

Nom de

Dieu

, who ever heard of a

plongeur with a moustache?"

   I began to protest, but he cut me short. "A

plongeur

with a moustache-nonsense! Take care I don't see you

with it to-morrow."

   On the way home I asked Boris what this meant.

He shrugged his shoulders. "You must do what he says,

mon ami

. No one in the hotel wears a moustache, except

the cooks. I should have thought you would have

noticed it. Reason? There is no reason. It is the

custom."

   I saw that it was an etiquette, like not wearing a white

tie with a dinner jacket, and shaved off my moustache.

Afterwards I found out the explanation of the custom,

which is this: waiters in good hotels do not wear

moustaches, and to show their superiority they decree

that

plongeurs shall not wear them either; and the cooks

wear their moustaches to show their contempt for the

waiters.

   This gives some idea of the elaborate caste system

existing in a hotel. Our staff, amounting to about a

hundred and ten, had their prestige graded as accurately

as that of soldiers, and a cook or waiter was as much

above a

plongeur as a captain above a private. Highest of

all came the manager, who could sack anybody, even the

cooks. We never saw the

patron, and all we knew of him

was that his meals had to be prepared more carefully than

that of the customers; all the discipline of the hotel

depended on the manager. He was a conscientious man,

and always on the lookout for slackness, but we were too

clever for him. A system of service bells ran through the

hotel, and the whole staff used these for signalling to one

another. A long ring and a short ring, followed by two

more long rings, meant that the manager was coming,

and when we heard it we took care to look busy.

   Below the manager came the

maitre d'hôtel. He did not

serve at table, unless to a lord or someone of that kind,

but directed the other waiters and helped with the

catering. His tips, and his bonus from the champagne

companies (it was two francs for each cork he

returned to them), came to two hundred francs a day. He

was in a position quite apart from the rest of the staff,

and took his meals in a private room, with silver on the

table and two apprentices in clean white jackets to serve

him. A little below the head waiter came the head cook,

drawing about five thousand francs a month; he dined in

the kitchen, but at a separate table, and one of the

apprentice cooks waited on him. Then came the

chef du

personnel

; he drew only fifteen hundred francs a month,

but he wore a black coat and did no manual work, and he

could sack

plongeurs and fine waiters. Then came the other

cooks, drawing anything between three thousand and

seven hundred and fifty francs a month; then the waiters,

making about seventy francs a day in tips, besides a

small retaining fee; then the laundresses and sewing

women; then the apprentice waiters, who received no

tips, but were paid seven hundred and fifty francs a

month; then the

plongeurs, also at seven hundred and fifty

francs; then the chambermaids, at five or six hundred

francs a month; and lastly the cafetiers, at five hundred a

month. We of the cafeterie were the very dregs of the

hotel, despised and tutoied by everyone.

   There were various others-the office employees,

called generally couriers, the storekeeper, the cellarman,

some porters and pages, the ice man, the bakers, the

night-watchman, the doorkeeper. Different jobs were

done by different races. The office employees and the

cooks and sewing-women were French, the waiters

Italians and Germans (there is hardly such a thing as a

French waiter in Paris), the

plongeurs of every race in

Europe, beside Arabs and negroes. French was the lingua

franca, even the Italians speaking it to one another.

   All the departments had their special perquisites.

In all Paris hotels it is the custom to sell the broken

bread to bakers for eight sous a pound, and the kitchen

scraps to pigkeepers for a trifle, and to divide the pro-

ceeds of this among the

plongeurs. There was much

pilfering, too. The waiters all stole food-in fact, I

seldom saw a waiter trouble to eat the rations provided

for him by the hotel-and the cooks did it on a larger

scale in the kitchen, and we in the cafeterie swilled

illicit tea and coffee. The cellarman stole brandy. By a

rule of the hotel the waiters were not allowed to keep

stores of spirits, but had to go to the cellarman for each

drink as it was ordered. As the cellarman poured out the

drinks he would set aside perhaps a teaspoonful from

each glass, and he amassed quantities in this way. He

would sell you the stolen brandy for five sous a swig if

he thought he could trust you.

   There were thieves among the staff, and if you left

money in your coat pockets it was generally taken. The

doorkeeper, who paid our wages and searched us for

stolen food, was the greatest thief in the hotel. Out of

my five hundred francs a month, this man actually

managed to cheat me of a hundred and fourteen francs in

six weeks. I had asked to be paid daily, so the door-

keeper paid me sixteen francs each evening, and, by not

paying for Sundays (for which of course payment was

due), pocketed sixty-four francs. Also, I sometimes

worked on a Sunday, for which, though I did not know

it, I was entitled to an extra twenty-five francs. The

doorkeeper never paid me this either, and so made away

with another seventy-five francs. I only realised during

my last week that I was being cheated, and, as I could

prove nothing, only twenty-five francs were refunded.

The doorkeeper played similar tricks on any employee

who was fool enough to be taken in. He called

himself a Greek, but in reality he was an Armenian.

After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb

"Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek,

but don't trust an Armenian."

   There were queer characters among the waiters. One

was a gentleman-a youth who had been educated at a

university, and had had a well-paid job in a business

office. He had caught a venereal disease, lost his job,

drifted, and now considered himself lucky to be a

waiter. Many of the waiters had slipped into France

without passports, and one or two of them were spies --it

is a common profession for a spy to adopt. One day

there was a fearful row in the waiters' dining-room

between Morandi, a dangerous-looking man with eyes

set too far apart, and another Italian. It appeared that

Morandi had taken the other man's mistress. The other

man, a weakling and obviously frightened of Morandi,

was threatening vaguely.

   Morandi jeered at him. "Well, what are you going to

do about it? I've slept with your girl, slept with her three

times. It was fine. What can you do, eh?"

   "I can denounce you to the secret police. You are an

Italian spy."

   Morandi did not deny it. He simply produced a razor

from his tail pocket and made two swift strokes in the

air, as though slashing a man's cheeks open. Whereat the

other waiter took it back.

   The queerest type I ever saw in the hotel was an

"extra." He had been engaged at twenty-five francs for

the day to replace the Magyar, who was ill. He was a

Serbian, a thick-set nimble fellow of about twenty-five,

speaking six languages, including English. He seemed to

know all about hotel work, and up till midday he worked

like a slave. Then, as soon as it had struck twelve, he

turned sulky, shirked his work, stole wine,

and finally crowned all by loafing about openly with a

pipe in his mouth. Smoking, of course, was forbidden

under severe penalties. The manager himself heard of it

and came down to interview the Serbian, fuming with

rage.

   "What the devil do you mean by smoking here?" he

cried.

   "What the devil do you mean by having a face like

that?" answered the Serbian, calmly.

   I cannot convey the blasphemy of such a remark. The

head cook, if a

plongeur had spoken to him like that,

would have thrown a saucepan of hot soup in his face.

The manager said instantly, "You're sacked!" and at two

o'clock the Serbian was given his twenty-five francs and

duly sacked. Before he went out Boris asked him in

Russian what game he was playing. He said the Serbian

answered

   "Look here,

mon vieux, they've got to pay me a day's

wages if I work up to midday, haven't they? That's the

law. And where's the sense of working after I get my

wages? So I'll tell you what I do. I go to a hotel and get

a job as an extra, and up to midday I work hard. Then,

the moment it's struck twelve, I start raising such hell

that they've no choice but to sack me. Neat, eh? Most

days I'm sacked by half-past twelve; to-day it was two

o'clock; but I don't care, I've saved four hours' work.

The only trouble is, one can't do it at the same hotel

twice."

   It appeared that he had played this game at half the

hotels and restaurants in Paris. It is probably quite an

easy game to play during the summer, though the hotels

protect themselves against it as well as they can by